Eight months ago, we had seen this news circulating around that Google gobbled up fitness tracker firm Fitbit worth of $2.1 billion.
Google is planning to acquire Fitbit, but it still needs to assure Australian regulators that their acquisition won’t cause any sort of competition or privacy issues. Unfortunately, their draft was knocked back by the court.
The company, which is looking forward to buy Fitbit for US$2.1 billion (A$2.77 billion), was able to win EU antitrust approval last week. However, their transaction is yet to be cleared by authorities in the US and Australia.
Google had submitted a “long-term behavioural undertaking” at the end of last month i.e. November in order to address concerns raised by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).
The undertaking included certain important points concerning on how Google will behave “towards rival wearable manufacturers” and further included a commitment not to use health data for advertising.
But the ACCC rejected their draft undertaking on Tuesday as they thought and analysed that it will be difficult to monitor for compliance.
Apart from rejecting the “current proposed undertaking”, the ACCC also extended the date to 25 March 2021 in order to continue its investigation and consider its legal options.
One of the spokespersons of Google Australia said that the company was “disappointed at this delay.” Considering the fact that Gmail hosting is massively used in the corporate world and it has huge market share and is well know for quality services and good reputation.
According to relevant sources it is evident that “The acquisition may result in Google becoming the default provider of wearable operating systems for non-Apple devices and give it the ability to be a gatekeeper for wearables data, similar to the position it holds for smartphones which licence the Android operating system.”
Along with the Apple devices and android operating systems, all smartphones definitely need mobile applications.
Final decision will be taken at the end of March 2021.
